Freeride has absolutely nothing to do with the softness of your wheels, freeride just means pretty much everything. Freeride is what every longboarder does when you go out skating just messing around doing some sliding, flip tricks, manuals, cruising, carving, bombing a normal session, any riding without a finish line basically, people get this confused because in different sports freeride is talking about such a specific type of riding with in a sport. But with longboarding it is just very general. A SLIDE set up would just mean you like to do more Sliding within a typical freeride session and therefore you would have some fairly soft bushings and wheels that will break into a slide easier than soft wheels would. In longboarding comps are normally sectioned into different aspects of freeride. You have a downhill division, sliding division, manuals division, and now longboarding is progressing so fast sometimes comps now will have a best rick division. Each aspect of the comp requires a different set up that is decided by each individual rider it is all about preference they aren't named according to the set up you have. You saying that freeride is referring to a specific set up just makes no sense because each rider has there own preferences as to what is better for them in freeride or what you prefer to do over anything else with in freeride determines your set up.
For example my set up is: Lush symbian, paris trucks venom soft bushings and cult classic wheels. This set up would be mainly meant for doing some sliding, manuals/flip tricks because of the kicktails but it is really rigid also so decent for downhill as well, also has concave to lock you in for high speed slides. My normal session is cruising and sliding and manual/flip tricks which this whole grouping would be called a freestyle because it lets me do almost everything besides extreme downhill like 40+ But I also do some heavy downhill with my friends who are more into that than I am so to fix the speed wobbles that I would get from riding my normal set up I just tighten the trucks a bit and use what I've got.
The point is, just stop getting caught up with names it is all a bunch of bull shit, longboarding is about just riding doing whatever it is that you like to do freeride means everything and companies uses those names to describe their decks just because they want to appeal to a specific type of rider but when it comes down to it the slightest tweak of equipment can give you a board that can really do anything. Huck it and Fuck it.
